We set off this morning to go and find Richard a bicycle. After a bit of research he had found a shop in Hongkou District in northern Shanghai that sold “Forever” bicycles – a locally made old fashioned model - he likes old things - so that’s where we headed.
- Hot Pot Restaurant
We found the bicycle shop with not much difficulty, found the right bike for around £60 and then went off to find a bank to get the cash to pay for it and to find some lunch. Opposite the atm machine was this restaurant. I don’t know what it’s called, but it turned out to specialize in fish. Once we were seated we asked for “one of those for two” as we had seen a family eating hot pot as we had walked to our seats.
- Lettuce tofu and heater
That’s all very well, ordering like that. But when it starts to arrive you realize you are not sure how you are supposed to deal with it. What arrived first of all was a camping gas burner, very similar to the one we have back in Britain for camping, a plate of tofu slices, a plate of lettuce and two ladles –one slotted, one not.
- Huge Hot Pot Dish
At this point we decided that we should be waiting some more. And then this huge hot pot bowl arrived and the waitress lit the gas under the pot. Now what? Did we start to eat it? I raised the lid. It didn’t look hot. It wasn’t hot. And then the waitress indicated that we needed to wait and we understood that we needed to wait until steam was rising through the steam hole.
Once this started to happen we were raring to go, but we had to wait some more as the waitress then added the tofu to warm it through. The lettuce was left to one side for us to add to the hotpot whenever we wanted to, and to take it out when it was just the way we liked it.
- Fish Hot Pot
The hotpot was based on a delicious chilli-flavoured stock. To this was added fish heads and half a large fish, tomatoes, spring onions, fish balls, long thin needle style mushrooms which we have seen for sale in the markets, the tofu and the braised lettuce, when we added it.
- Prawn rice bread
The bowl was huge and almost overwhelming and then on top of all that wedges of what looked at first glance to be a sliced up prawn pizza arrived. This turned out to be a bread made from rice, flavoured with spring onions and with baked prawns in their shells on top.
We rolled out of the restaurant feeling decidedly stuffed. Richard left to go and buy his bicycle - he was aiming to cycle all the way across central Shanghai back to the apartment. I headed off to the local Heping Park for more people watching before heading back on the metro.
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